willedoo

The worst movie I've ever tried to watch is 'Canopy'. I've had two goes at it and haven't made it past the 15 minute mark. There's absolutely no incentive to try a third time. It sounded good - a WW2 Australian fighter pilot shot down over Singapore and trying to evade Japanese patrols. The reality is it's an excruciatingly tedious arty-farty independent so-called 'suspense drama'. Absolutely nothing happens in the movie from what the reviews say. To be fair, there's supposed to be five or six words of dialogue somewhere in the film. Good luck if you can stick it out long enough to hear one of the characters speak. It's one of those films where the camera will spend five minutes focused on a drop of water falling from a leaf. That's the suspense part. Where the drama is eludes me. This movie is not just slightly worse than some others; it's in a league all of it's own. It doesn't matter at what stage you turn the movie off; you won't miss anything. It's the same shite all the way through apparently. I'm waiting for the sequel - 'Two flies crawl up a wall'.

A journalist once asked him about the separation of powers and he had no idea what the journalist was referring to.

I only see drongos here two or three times a year. About as frequent as cat bird appearances.

Nev, you would have liked to have been with us in the early 1970's when myself and a couple of other blokes got a guided tour aboard a big roll on/roll off ship unloading in Brisbane. It was during the cement strike and we were there picking up loads of Tasmanian cement from a local freighter. It was a slow day with the wharfies continually stopping, so we wandered down the dock to have a look at the big ship. As we were standing there looking up at it, the ship's 2IC (1st officer?) approached us and invited us aboard. He gave us a fairly comprehensive tour through the ship, including the officer's mess, the galley and down on the cargo decks. The highlight was when he took us into the huge engine room to see the three great big engines. From there we went up up to a mezzanine deck which was the engine control/instrument room. It was a fairly new state of the art ship at the time and belonged to a Scandinavian/Australian company. It was built as a roll on/roll off vehicle transporter and had a full load of Mercedes Benz cars. It was controlled mayhem unloading it with swags of drivers ferrying cars out from multiple decks with traffic control people with stop/go signs directing them.

I spent a year as a deckhand on a prawn trawler which was an experience. Working the shallow water in the summer months was tiring. Lots of short shots and not much sleep. The deep water season was a lot easier with longer shots and time to have a bit of a sleep between shots. During the deep water season we had enough fuel to stay out about six nights before coming home but the shallow water was daytime work within sight of land and we'd go back to port every day. It wasn't a big boat, a timber 45' wet boat with a very noisy GM 671 bird scarer powering it. You spent most of your time damp, tired and smelling of sea creatures but it had it's good points. Like watching all the leaping dolphins silhouetted by the rising sun as you steamed toward the reef to anchor up for the day with all the seagulls forming an overhead escort. Another good sight was those rare days when the ocean was a mill pond. It's a strange sight being miles out to see and water like glass with not a trace of a ripple. The water would have a silky effect as you cut through it.

Someone on the radio pointed out that if the LNP win next month's Queensland election, it will be only the second general election win for the conservatives since Joh Bjelke-Petersen's last win in 1986. The LNP did one term from 2012 to 2015. The Borbage coalition government (1996-1998) didn't win a general election. The court of disputed returns ordered a re-ballot in one seat and the coalition won the by-election which caused the Labor government to lose their majority. I've used the term conservatives to cover all three conservative entities that have held government since the Bjelke-Petersen era - the National/Liberal coalition, National Party on their own and the merged LNP. Bjelke-Petersen won his last two elections out of coalition with a National Party majority.

They're very normal birds. If any deserve the title of drongo, it should be the noisy friarbird. The friarbirds are total drongos.

Some of these ebay sellers must laugh themselves silly when they make a sale. One example - a Gorilla brand bow shackle on ebay for $34.95 plus $9.95 postage. You can walk into Bunnings and buy the exact same thing for $14.80. My guess is the ebay sellers get an order from a sucker, then wander down to Bunnings and buy the item to send away to the buyer. A bit like dropshippers in a way.

Until you mentioned birds of prey, I'd never really given them a thought here at my place. I'm on steep hilly country covered in thick timber and now that I think about it, one reason why there's so many smaller species here is because of the protection the terrain and tree cover gives them. The hawks and occasional osprey hunt out on the floodplain adjacent to my place. It's mainly covered in open paddocks or sugar cane. Cane land is a real breeding ground for rodents and it's good open swooping country for the birds of prey. There's nowhere on my place where they could safely swoop with all the tree cover.

The weather prediction for this area is turning out to be a fizzer. There was supposed to be an inch of rain today but looking at the radar it's all gone south. Brisbane seems to have got the rain.Have probably only had 5mm here at most overnight.

It's interesting how the different bird species get on with each other. The raven and the butcher birds seem to tolerate each other ok although they compete for food. All the honeyeater species get on well together and the butcher birds get on with them ok. It's not unusual to see a butcher bird and honeyeaters rubbing shoulders around the bird bath. Yesterday a butcher bird was having a bath and he had an audience of noisy miners standing in a ring around him waiting for their turn. It's only a small bath consisting of one of those enamel wash basins you buy from the camping places. I've seen a similar thing before when the raven was in the bath. Because of his size he takes up most of the bath. He was happily splashing away while directly above him perched on the guttering was a line of noisy miners with one lone butcher bird on the end of the line, all looking down at the raven. They don't fear the raven, but for security the smaller birds keep a few feet distant from him. The kookburras on the other hand are disliked by all the other birds. They're like the beagle boys of the bird world.

I once had a 60lt drum as a water heater. It was on it's side on a frame with legs long enough to build a fire underneath. For the water outlet I screwed some threaded gal pipe into the bung hole which was positioned at the top. At the other end of the drum I cut a round hole in the top. Into this went a length of gal pipe that ran almost down to the bottom of the drum. The top of the pipe was brazed to a half cut 20lt drum that acted as a bucket. You would light the fire, heat the water up, then whatever amount of cold water you poured into the cut 20lt section would go to the bottom of the drum and force the hot water up and out the outlet spout. A fairly primitive donkey. This is a rough sketch done by a mouse:

The 60 litre oil drums were handy for a lot of things like that. I don't know if they still make them or not; I haven't seen one around for a long time.

Meanwhile, up here on the highway there's a big billboard advertising Australia Zoo with Robert Irwin having metric tonnes of fun. Some things just aren't right.

That's ok Marty, if he gets arrested we can all chip in with a character reference.

When I went to ag college it was a two year course that was the equivalent of grade 11 and 12 high school. The college owned a bush block up in the hills and in the middle of the second year we all had to go up there to do a week long timber camp. It was real back woods stuff. Accommodation was a long corrugated iron hut with one big long dormitory room full of bunk beds and a second room on the end with a kitchen and eating area. There was no electricity, just kerosene lanterns and a wood stove with an old shearers cook toiling away with the biggest, blackest pots and frying pan I've ever seen. He could cook bacon and eggs for a dozen or more people in one go with that frypan. It was freezing cold at night with no showers on site. We all had a bogey in the dam after work and it was that cold, you had to strip off and run in, scream and run out to soap up, then run back in again to rinse off. It was like those Russians jumping in a hole in the ice for Epiphany. We didn't do any chainsaw instruction until the last day of the camp. The rest of it was all cross-cut sawing to drop the trees and stump and top them. A little Cat crawler (D3 or D4?) would snig the logs up to the flat area where we would bark them, cross-cut saw them into fence post lengths then split them into posts with wedges and sledge hammers. They also made us adze the rough split edges of the posts. I think it was supposed to be one of those character building things. When my dad did the same camp back in the 1930's, he sunk the adze blade into the side of his foot and ended up with a stay in the local hospital.

1988 was the same year I bought my Stihl which is an 034 Super. The Super was about 61cc so an extra 5cc on the 034. It's been a good saw. I don't know what the smaller Husqvarnas are like but the one I have was the most used saw in forestry work around the world at the time I bought it. The professional range seems to have a fairly good name in the industry although I don't know much about the new model that has replaced mine.

I don't remember the last timber I cut with it but it would have been either brushbox, ironbark or bloodwood. I've never had it happen with the Stihl saw; maybe the Husqvarna case has a different alloy composition.

It was a good lesson not to leave a saw lying around in an uncleaned state for a long time. The chain oil residue mixes with the sawdust to make corrosive gunk. It ate a few decent sized pit marks on the inside of the aluminium drive sprocket case and even went right through in a couple of small areas. I think it's the acid or tannin in the sawdust that does it. When I get the saw back I'll do the old superglue + baking soda trick to fill the pits.

One step closer to those slabs. Yesterday I got the saw all bolted together, cleaned up, free of hornet mud and in to the local Husqvarna dealer to see if they can get it going. I gave it a few pulls before taking it in but saw no sign of any spark. Fingers crossed it won't cost an arm and a leg to fix. That's one job that's been a long time coming. It's been sitting around semi disassembled for a long time.

I had a plywood returning boomerang when I was a kid but it was a bought one.

Most plywood is imported, but I suppose the few remaining Australian manufacturers wouldn't be able to offer any better price due to the high production costs here.

Here's one possible scenario: it could start with a chainsaw wielding bloke in Borneo. The trees are cut, topped and hauled out of the jungle with a log skidder so a grapple can load them onto timber trucks for the journey down to the coast. There a crane loads them onto barges for the trip down to the main port where they are unloaded and loaded onto ships for the trip across the ocean to the port at Jakarta. There they are unloaded onto trucks and transported to the plywood factory where the logs are processed by peeling and cutting to size. Add lots of expensive glue, pressure and heat and a bit more sizing before stacking the finished sheets on pallets, strapping them and forklifting them into shipping containers. Then container trucks take the containers back to the port to be loaded onto a container ship bound for Australia where the importer will pay customs duty and a raft of other port and inspection charges on top of the freight and initial product cost. When the ship arrives here, the containers are loaded onto trucks and transported to the wholesaler/importer's warehouse where the plywood is unloaded from the shipping containers and stored. As orders come in the plywood is then loaded onto delivery trucks and taken to the big green and red shed, forklifted off and stacked in the building supplies section where the friendly staff will sell us a sheet or two and collect the GST for the government. But that's only a guess.

I wonder where you go to buy second hand stuff these days. Most of the demolition and scrap yards are closed down around here, Gumtree is nearly dead and Facebook Marketplace is inhabited by crooks.

I was at an old mate's 80th. recently at his nursing home (he has Parkinson's). He belongs to one of those born again churches and I think I was the only non church friend there. One of them was talking about the need to use cash and how cards are the mark of the beast referred to in the bible. I can remember working for some born again people back in the early 1990's and they were banging on back then about debt and credit cards carrying the mark of the beast.